A growing number of consumers now have high speed, or broadband, connections to the Internet in their homes. The increased bandwidth provided by these broadband connections allows the delivery of media services, such as telephone, digital television, and/or video, to a multimedia terminal adapter (MTA) located in the home. Several of these technologies use one or more protocols in the Internet Protocol (IP) family as a delivery mechanism. In the telephony context, this technology is known as Voice over IP (VoIP). In the video context, this technology is known as IP television, or IPTV.
The IP family of protocols uses a layered approach, with IP itself acting as the network layer protocol. Sitting on top of the IP network layer is a transport layer such as TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) or User Data Protocol (UDP). The IP family also includes a variety of session layer protocols above the transport layer, such as Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP), File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP), Real-Time Transport Control Protocol (RTCP) and Session Description Protocol (SDP). IPTV delivers video or television as a Motion Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) transport stream, carried by UDP/IP, or RTP/UDP/IP. VoIP carries the voiceband data in an RTP/UDP/IP stream, uses SDP for call setup and signaling, and RTCP to monitor quality of service (QoS).
Typically, each service (e.g., data, voice, video) is carried as a separate stream within the single broadband connection to the home. Furthermore, each instance of a service is itself a separate stream. Thus, when the home is using the MTA to make a VoIP phone call, to watch an IPTV channel, to browse a web page, and to download a file, this results in at least four simultaneous streams. In a conventional MTA, the streams within the MTA are unaware of each other, and no centralized entity manages the bandwidth of the broadband connection. Therefore, in a conventional MTA the amount of bandwidth that is used by a particular stream depends on the remote transmitter (i.e., the video program source, the web server, or the phone). If too much bandwidth is used by data services, media packets may be dropped, and the usability of media services can be adversely affected. Thus, a need arises for these and other problems to be addressed.